Now HERE Was A Democrat!

[kpete]

FDR Second Bill of Rights Speech Footage

What should Democrats stand for? This. Just this.

(Snippet)

Franklin D. Roosevelt
4 - State of the Union Message to Congress
January 11, 1944



................


We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

.............

FULL TRANSCRIPT:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518

[rdharma]

1. And he welcomed their hatred!

[jsr]

7. That is called leadership.

[Doctor_J]

12. In fairness, Obama does seem to relish his disdain

by the left. Remember he compares us to the teabaggers.

[frazzled]

2. Yes, Roosevelt was great, but

We can't pick and choose. He also ordered thousands of Japanese Americans--all of them, actually--to be removed physically from their homes and jobs and placed in internment camps for the duration of the war. (Imagine Barack Obama pulling something like that!):

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, requiring aliens from World War II-enemy countries--Italy, Germany and Japan--to register with the United States Department of Justice. Registered persons were then issued a Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality. A follow-up to the Alien Registration Act of 1940, Proclamation No. 2537 facilitated the beginning of full-scale internment of Japanese Americans the following month.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/roosevelt-ushers-in-japanese-american-internment

He tried to pack the Supreme Court with six additional justices, and no matter how good the intentions for it to get certain aspects his New Deal stuff deemed constitutional, it was still a power grab that would have set a horrible precendent. He bargained with Southern Democrat racists. His original Social Security plan was less than ideal (huge segments of the population were excluded, mostly blacks and women, and there were no cost-of-living increases, etc.).

Roosevelt was a great, great president. But if DU were operational back then, we would have heard howls and screams far and wide about him and his agenda. By the same token, a DU sixty years in the future will probably be cherrypicking some excerpts from Obama's speeches and saying, "Now there's a Democrat!"

My point is simply this: no president is one thing, and none is perfect. Thankfully none (even Nixon, or even GW Bush, was entirely and wholly an evil despot; even they had a few minor decent points, like AIDS and immigration reform).

[truebluegreen]

3. I don't think any FDR Democrat is going to look fondly on Obama 60 years in the future,

any more than they do Bill Clinton now.

My opinion. Internment was a terrible thing; social security wasn't perfect to begin with but compared to what preceded it? And as for the court-packing scheme, the threat certainly got the job done didn't it? FDR saved capitalism (even the effing banksters), saved our economy and our people, saved Europe, saved Asia, and laid the groundwork for a boom such as the world had never known.

Obama, unfortunately, isn't even in the running. In my view--which is as harsh as my hopes were high--his biggest accomplishment is/was getting elected in the first place. He could have been, and done, so much more: I will forever be of the opinion that the Repuke wave in 2010 was a result of Obama's same old, same old policies--looking forward, not back, all that stuff. Again, my opinion. A great opportunity was ignored in order to continue many of the same crappy policies. "We don't suck as bad" is neither an inspiration nor useful; FDR didn't make those mistakes.

[jtuck004]

4. We are on the same page. FDR, I think, was more conservative than a lot of people think, but his

wife, and hundreds x hundreds of people around him were steeped in the need for cooperation, industrial and craft unions, and thought that people should have jobs and make enough to support themselves. There were hungry kids being marched through the streets in front of the White House, veterans fighting for their rights. They MADE his ass do what he did, and at the same time he was able to work on the side of business with the craft unions, (against what was left of the industrial unions), to keep the changes more palatable - and this side of nationalizing some of them, which is what should have been done. He even pulled back a bit at one point, and things took a dive, but got pulled out by WWII. That put a lot of money into the pockets of people who would spend it, and we rolled on.

This President is surrounded by the very rentiers that stole from us then and are stealing opportunity from now, arguing the need for sending most of our assets to banks and out in interest, paltry or non-existent investment in long term economic health, letting tens of millions languish on pathetic and insulting government aid with no real chance of getting away from it and kept that way by government policy of making tax cuts permanent for the wealthy. The advisers are hundreds x hundreds of [link: recreation; |people] that are far more concerned about protecting their Master's house from burning down then their own or their neighbor's. And their Master is whomever has the most money, a behavior that is nearly as low and lacking in humanity as any.

If your choice is R vs D, evil vs lesser evil, your time is finite anyway, unless you change it, 'cause evil will destroy you regardless. I don't know if there will even be Democrats in 60 years. 10 years down the road there may be a Latino Democracy Party with enough money and power that they tell the Ds to get bent, and grow their own. Black folks have been and still are getting the shaft in a way a lot of more well-off folks don't, many or most of those white, and future Ds should take note of that - they may not continue to bring votes if they can't get jobs and a little bit more respect, and they sure as hell ain't getting them/it now.

There are far worse things that could come about as a result of these policies that favor the wealthy than just a bad rep for policies that favor replacing better paying jobs with lower paying part time-jobs or nothing, leaving millions of people in poverty, and perhaps a new cold war.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish" comes to mind.

[Drunken Irishman]

5. FDR made a lot of mistakes that the left crucify Obama over...

1) He cut spending that led to a major recession in the midst of the Great Depression. Much of the gains out of his original New Deal were absolutely erased because of his poor economic leadership in his second term.

2) His record on civil rights is dubious at best. He promised to support the banning of lynching while running for president and then backpedaled due to pressure from the Southern Conservatives - a group of people he needed support from to advance much of his legislation. Then, of course, there is the aforementioned internment of Japanese-Americans. Roosevelt also initially opposed opening the immigration laws to Jews who were looking to relocate out of Nazi Germany and Poland. He favored, instead, relocating them to other nations and adopted this position out of fear of Charles Lindbergh and men like him. Eventually, he was pushed by Eleanor enough to accept the policy. Roosevelt also was slow to publicly supported civil rights for blacks. In fact, it was mostly Eleanor who took up the issue. This despite the fact he was an extremely popular figure who had some major clout with Americans. Certainly Truman did more for race relations than FDR. The reality here is that FDR's record on civil rights was pretty moderate - at best. Mostly, though, he stayed away from the issue.

3) Roosevelt's court packing plan was absolutely unconstitutional and you could make the case so was a great deal of his New Deal policies - though, as a supporter of the New Deal, I think the argument isn't as strong.

4) FDR's war record completely obliterates Obama's. For how much the left howls about war, and war crimes, Roosevelt's leadership through WWII was the definition of harsh. If Obama did half what FDR did in either Afghanistan or Iraq, he would've been impeached. Not that I disagree with what Roosevelt did, but again, it's select anger. FDR firebombed an entire city - slaughtering up to 25,000 people - all to flex the U.S.'s military muscle.

5) FDR had three terms to endear himself to the American people. Obama doesn't. Clinton didn't. If Roosevelt had only two terms to be our president, he would've probably gone down as a very good president - but his second term was pretty disastrous. He faced opposition from both Republicans and Democrats and his legislative accomplishments was absolutely non-existent throughout the four years of his second term. FDR also lost the support of a great deal of labor in his second term, and it weakened the party so that the Republicans, who many thought dead just a couple years earlier, made massive gains in the first midterm of his second term - where Republicans in the House gained 81 seats (to contrast, in 2010, which you blame Obama for, Republicans only gained 63 seats). He was neutralized by a growing conservative faction within his own party, and while his personal popularity helped win him a third term, much of what he accomplished was established early in his presidency - when Democrats held 322 seats in the House (compared to 103) and 69 seats in the U.S. Senate. Obama and the Democrats never came close to having that type of majority.

FDR is one of our top-three presidents. Obama won't ever be considered that. But FDR also is there because he led the U.S. through World War - not just because he led us out of the Great Depression. There only is a once in a lifetime moment that elevates a certain president to the task to be considered great and, IMO, that was the founding of our country, the Civil War and the Great Depression & World War II. Had Roosevelt honored the second term limit tradition, he would be overwhelmingly considered a great - but not in the discussion for the greatest. It's unfair to say Obama, or Clinton, are no FDR because they haven't faced the tasks FDR faced. No president since has and that truly is how we define greatness.

FDR made plenty of mistakes. We just don't talk about 'em because, 80 years later, the greatness of his leadership overwhelms the negative. I am confident the same will happen for Obama. The fact is, more than any president sans LBJ since FDR, Obama's legislative accomplishments trump any modern president. That's the difference.

[Jackpine Radical]

15. I think what you say is fair, except that the present time--

with global warming and general environmental destruction due largely to the fossil-fuel industry, rapidly growing income inequality and an accompanying surge in the misery index of the average American, the moment is already here, and Obama squandered his one chance at tackling it in his first term. Had he been bolder in his initiatives, had he not played footsie with the 1% and their Republican lackeys--had he, in short, been true to the principles to which he gave lip service in his 2008 campaign, he could have generated a wave of enthusiasm in the country that would have brought about a totally different outcome in the 2010 mid-terms. If the Obama voters of 2008 stayed home in 2010, it was not because of some inexplicable wave of indifference that swept the country; it was because people felt betrayed.

[whathehell]

6. I agree completely..

FDR was named as America's third greatest President by historians in 2009..Only Washington

and Lincoln ranked ahead of him.

[Enthusiast]

9. I am so with you on this.

Now this was a fucking mandate. And the people had his back.

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[Doctor_J]

10. Or 5

The fallout from Heritage Care, TPP, drone murder, continued torture, KXL, Chained CPI, Race To The Bottom, "All of the above" energy non-policy, and his other Republican policies will be felt long before 60 more years have gone by. I don't think the party can recover from him & Reid & Pelosi during my remaining 15 years or so. And since the party can't recover, neither can the country. There was so much promise and hope in January 2009, and almost none left.

[Enthusiast]

8. Kicked and recommended an entire shit load!

And quit shipping our fucking jobs overseas! Hear that, Mr President?

How can we have job opportunities when we are engaged in a race to the bottom? This doesn't benefit anyone but the corporate bottom line which amounts to a extremely tiny segment of the population.

[MrMickeysMom]

11. Yes, indeed...

Just THAT.

[grahamhgreen]

13. +1

[840high]

16. ....+1

[Recursion]

14. Remind me how many of those passed? (nt)

[Rex]

17. But but but...blood on fangs and claws!

Real Democrats(tm) in GD, have told me that FDR was second only to the devil! How can they be so off!?